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Late in the autumn of 1549, six months after Lady Jane had returned to Bradgate, the celebrated scholar, Roger Ascham, in passing through the neighbourhood, being an acquaintance of the Dorsets, stopped to call at the Manor House, but met all the family except Lady Jane, going to the hunt. After a brief chat with them he inquired for Lady Jane, and being told that she was at home, asked if he might pay his respects to her, which request being readily granted, he went on to the house. Standing outside the open casement of Lady Jane’s own sitting-room for a moment, he watched her as she sat in the window seat, so deeply engaged with her book that he could look over her shoulder unnoticed and to his astonishment saw that she was reading the Phaedon of Plato in Greek!

He spoke, and Jane looked up. At once he asked her why she relinquished such pastime as was then going on in the park for the sake of study?

With a smile Jane answered, “I think all their sport in the park is but a shadow to the pleasure I find in Plato!”

Interested and delighted, Ascham pursued the subject. “And how attained you,” he asked, “to this true knowledge of pleasure? And what did chiefly allure you to it, seeing that few women and not many men have arrived at it?”

“I will tell you,” replied Lady Jane. “And tell you a truth which perchance you may marvel at. One of the greatest benefits that God ever gave me is that He sent me, with sharp severe parents, so gentle a schoolmaster (Aylmer). When I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silent, sit, stand or go, or drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing or dancing or doing anything else, I must do it as it were in such measure weight and number, even as perfectly as God made the earth, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs, and other things (which T will not name for the honour I bear them), that I think myself in Hell ’till the time comes when I must go with Mr. Alymer who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, that I think nothing of all the time whilst I am with him, and when I am called from him I fall to weeping because whatever I do else but learning is full of great trouble, fear and wholesome misliking unto me.”

Poor lonely little fourteen-year-old Lady Jane, what a clear light this throws on the treatment her parents gave the responsive, sensitive child, and how it shows up the mental forcing process of that day! Down through the ages comes to us this picture of a sweet young girl sitting alone poring over a Greek classic–thankful for that resource which saved her for the moment from reproaches and taunts, “nips, bobs and pinches.”

From that time Roger Ascham was one of Lady Jane’s closest friends, and doubtless the comradeship was a real stimulus to the brilliant girl, as letters from her to him show.

On October the eleventh, in 1551, Lady Jane’s father was raised to the peerage, which gave to him and his wife the new titles of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. The family now went to London, to occupy Sheen Abbey, and Lady Jane was presented at Court, taking her first prominent part in Court festivities, when she attended the entry into London of the Scottish Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, who had come on a visit to King Edward.

When King Edward and Mary met first at Westminster Palace, Mary rode in her chariot from the city to Whitehall, and with her rode many noble ladies, among them Lady Jane, to whom the brilliant pageant must have been a great diversion, after the seclusion of Bradgate.